Movie Review: “Oppenheimer”

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar (Warning: Spoilers ahead)

Reviewing biopics is tricky. On one hand, if you are someone informed about the facts, it’s easy to bring a scalpel and dissect every fact and character in minute detail, an exercise that will almost always lead to a critical and often negative view of a film. On the other hand, knowing that a movie is a medium of expression defined a certain way, one has to allow for creative license and some convenient omissions and embellishments that would be unforgivable in a documentary or historically accurate drama. Thus, the best way to review biopics in my opinion is a middle path, making allowance for artistic interpretations and changes of fact while still holding the movie maker up to high standards in terms of making sure that these changes don’t fundamentally distort the soul of the narrative.

I went into Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour extravaganza keeping this middle ground in mind. Having just written an eight-part series about Oppenheimer and been familiar with his life and work for a fairly long time, I approached the film with fairly high expectations. And I have to say that I was impressed. If one simple metric of a high-quality film is its ability to keep you glued to your seat for 3 hours, “Oppenheimer” delivers in spades. Much of this effect comes from Nolan’s judiciously assembled direction and from outstanding performances by key characters that keep the audience riveted. “Oppenheimer” is an Oliver Stone-like jigsaw puzzle, breathlessly switching between timelines, black and white scenes and pithy character lines interspersed with artistic imagery of crackling jolts of electricity, the shimmer of particles and waves and imagined operatic scenes of stars that signify the deep scientific reality behind our everyday world. Key aspects of the Trinity test like the assembly of the bomb and the details of the fireball are accurately rendered. But first and foremost, it is a drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Read more »

Law Versus Justice

Posted on by Barry Goldman

by Barry Goldman

Back in 1987 Jared Diamond wrote a piece for Discover Magazine titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” In it, Diamond argued “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” Hunter gatherers, Diamond wrote, ate better, worked less, lived longer, and had fewer diseases than farmers. “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”

I have come to a similar (and related) conclusion. In this piece and the ones that follow I’m going to argue that the second worst mistake in the history of the human race was the adoption of the rule of law.

The official website of the US court system says:

Rule of law is a principle under which all persons, institutions, and entities are accountable to laws that are:

  • Publicly promulgated
  • Equally enforced
  • Independently adjudicated
  • And consistent with international human rights principles.

The idea rests on three assumptions. It assumes we are capable of determining what the rules should be. It assumes we are capable of arranging the rules into a complete and coherent system. And it assumes we are capable of applying the rules of that system fairly and justly. The  evidence does not support those assumptions. Read more »

My Grandfather’s Ghost

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

My father David Fischkin and my mother Ida Siegel Fischkin at their wedding at the Rockaway Mansion, Livonia Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. February 23, 1936

Again, I thought about changing my name.

I dreamed about publishing essays under a new byline. I tried out pseudonyms for my next book. I wrote down alternate names, said them out loud. A name change would make introductions easier. Now, when I extend my hand and say “Fischkin,” people look at me funny, as if I might be holding live bait.

I can live with Barbara. As a first name, it is dated. But Barbara will come back in style. First names do. I was almost named Benita. Benita Fischkin. Think of that. My mother loved that name, until a friend said a cute nickname for me could be Mussa—close enough to Mussolini.

That was all my mother Ida Siegel Fischkin had to hear. She was a passionate supporter of the State of Israel, a lifetime Hadassah member and a child survivor of an antisemitic pogrom. Benita went down the drain. As a little girl, bored with Barbara—too easy to spell—I asked my mother if she had ever wanted to name me something else.

“Benita,” she said. My mother hid little from me.

Wow, I thought, wishing she had gone through with it. A name like that dripped with fame, fortune and beauty.

Benita as a baby name for a newborn girl must have been making the rounds of pregnant mothers in our Brooklyn neighborhood, circa 1954. Very odd since this was less than a decade after World War II. My guess: When it came to villains, Hitler was the main event. I bet no one ever said: “For a boy, how about Adolph?” Read more »

We Should Be More Skeptical of Mindfulness and More Appreciative of Escapism

Posted on by Rebecca Baumgartner

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Photo by Chelsea Gates on Unsplash

Imagine someone sitting cross-legged on the floor and breathing deeply. Now imagine someone sitting on a couch and playing a video game. 

Which of these is mindfulness and which is escapism? What differentiates them? Why does one seem healthier or more virtuous than the other? And what assumptions about human cognition and flourishing does that assignment of virtue rest on?

Mindfulness adherents tell us we can savor the present moment by noticing all our physical sensations in great detail: the textures we feel, the sounds we hear, the sensation of our breathing, and other forms of physical feedback. Our personality and ego take a backseat to simply being present to what’s around us.

My contrarian view is that this hyperfocus on minutiae allows the person sitting on a mat meditating to escape everything in their life that isn’t sitting on a mat meditating. Wanting to escape is not the problematic part; the issue is that we’re deceiving ourselves that it’s not escapism. Meditating and other forms of mindfulness offer a metaphysical escapism that lets you pretend for a while that you are no more than an organism receiving inputs from your immediate surroundings, with no interpretative or meaning-making capabilities. This is why certain types of meditation and other mindful states are described as “no-mind” states. 

While meditating, you’re not an adult with responsibilities or a personality or justified reasons to be angry or sad – no, you’re something much simpler and easier to control: a Mars rover or a rat in a Skinner box, simply responding to stimuli and gathering data from your surroundings, making no judgments, having no desires, and keeping emotional reactions in check. If your mind does break the rules and have a thought (and it always will), you are supposed to observe it impersonally, as though it’s a cloud passing high above that has nothing to do with you. Read more »

Boost the Public Understanding of Science By Raising the Status of Understanding Science

Posted on by Joseph Shieber

by Joseph Shieber

A recent study in Public Understanding of Science found that

… Republicans and evangelical-identifying individuals perceive more social threat from scientists. Viewing scientists as a group posing a social threat was associated with having less accurate science beliefs, support for excluding scientists from policymaking, and support for retributive actions toward scientists …

One of the co-authors of the study, Ariel Hassell, suggested that the study demonstrates that, “When people position science as something we should be for or against, believe or disbelieve, we lose sight of the fact that scientific research is a process.” She continued:

Often new evidence renders previous knowledge incorrect or irrelevant … Distrust, criticism and debate, when done in good faith, are part of this process and should be engaged with rather than demonized or weaponized. Otherwise, as our study shows, people may begin to see science and scientists as a social or political threat, inhibiting society’s ability to address large scale problems like hunger, disease and climate change.

It strikes me as correct to see this study as offering evidence that it is unhelpful to criticize as irrational those communities that reject scientific consensuses. I’m not sure that a further lesson from the study, however, is to suggest that “science isn’t something to be for or against.” Instead, it would be more useful to find a way to reorient those communities so that being informed about — and being in agreement with — elite scientific opinions would contribute to higher social status. That is, it seems to me that we SHOULD be finding ways to encourage more communities to perceive science as something they should be FOR. (Indeed, only then – as the study itself shows – will they appreciate “the fact that scientific research is a process.”)

I take this to be one of the lessons emerging out of my recently published paper, “An Idle and Most False Imposition: Truth-Seeking vs. Status-Seeking and the Failure of Epistemic Vigilance.” (It’s available as open access article here.) Here’s why. Read more »

The Secret River of One’s Life

Posted on by Nils Peterson

by Nils Peterson

One of the easy metaphors, easy because it just feels true, is that life is like a river in its flowing from then to whenever. We are both a leaf floating on it, and the river itself. Boat maybe. Raft more likely. But those who know such things say there is a river beneath the river, the hyporheic flow. “This is the water that moves under the stream, in cobble beds and old sandbars. It edges up the toe slope to the forest, a wide unseen river that flows beneath the eddies and the splash. A deep invisible river, known to its roots and rocks, the water and the land intimate beyond our knowing. It is the hyporheic flow I’m listening for.” The person speaking is Robin  Kimmerer, a biologist, professor and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It’s from her book Braiding Sweetgrass.

I’ve used the river image often enough in my own writing when thinking about my life and the lives of others, but now I’m wondering if what I was really trying to do was to find a way to listen to this deeper river, to get a sense of it as it winds its way to, well, Is there such a thing as the hyporheic sea? There must be and therefore all my sea images really float on that sea beneath the sea. Robin says, “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.” Well, yes. This is the poet’s understanding too, and I think it is the basic understanding of language, maybe of consciousness. 

I’m thinking now of a girl I dated my junior year in college. I had to come back to school a little early because I sang in the choir and there was a special program early that we had been asked to sing for. The football team also came back early for its fall practice. This girl in addition to being a singer was a cheerleader. It worked out that fall that she went out with me every other weekend. A football player took her out the in-between weeks. I was a year younger than my class and very shy. I had just started to do things on the campus, act in plays, write for the newspaper, join the creative writing club, finding out how much I loved literature. I enjoyed talking with her. Maybe we held hands, but the truth was she awed me. I was continually surprised she was out with me.  Read more »

Always in the Garden: On Two Recent Films from Paul Schrader

Posted on by Derek Neal

by Derek Neal

There is a scene near the end of First Reformed, the 2017 film directed by Paul Schrader, where the pastor of a successful megachurch says to the pastor of a small, sparsely attended church:

You’re always in the Garden. Jesus wasn’t always in the Garden, on his knees, sweating drops of blood. No, he was on the Mount, in the temple, in the marketplace. But you’re always in the Garden. For you every hour is the darkest hour.

The small-town pastor, played by Ethan Hawke, is in a state of constant suffering and isolation. His son, who he pushed to enlist in the army, has been killed in combat; his wife has left him; his home contains no furniture or decoration; he drinks heavily and writes in a journal; he rejects all those who try to help him; he is dying from cancer. Despite all this, he is a good pastor and cares deeply about the people he serves.

In another recent Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter (2021), the titular character played by Oscar Isaac is another man who is “always in the Garden.” He, too, drinks heavily and keeps a journal; he drives from city to city by himself, playing blackjack at various casinos before moving on to avoid attracting unwanted attention; he stays in budget motels and covers the furniture with sheets; he has no friends and no fixed home. Read more »

Monday, July 17, 2023

Your Rights: Roberts’ Rules Of Order

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. …[W]e do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country. —Chief Justice John Roberts, Opinion of the Court, Biden v. Nebraska

Let us not be misled.

Here we go again.  Another year, another round of controversial Supreme Court rulings, another set of difficult questions about the behavior of Supreme Court Justices.

This is not a happy group, and the unhappiness is not merely ideological. The personalities are different. In each of the four instances of changing seats since 2016, the Court lost a bit of its temperamental cohesiveness. Beyond the famous friendship between Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, Justice Kennedy was conciliatory and mindful of the Court’s traditions; Justice Breyer was courtly and insisted he was among friends. Now we have Justice Kagan squaring off against the Chief; Justices Thomas and Jackson engaging in what looks to be a very personal argument; and Justice Alito veering from searching for the Dobbs leaker, to accusing his critics of endangering his life, to airing his grievances from the safe space of the WSJ Opinion pages. Let me admit to being surprised that Justice Kavanaugh not only vouches for collegiality, but is also the Justice most in the majority.

That the liberal wing of the Court is discontented is understandable—with a couple of exceptions, it’s getting crushed on the field. Linda Greenhouse, in an article for The New York Times, points out that long-held conservative wishes that had been dammed up behind the pre-Trump-largely-centrist Court have been realized. Abortion, guns, affirmative action, the open embrace of religion, and a heavy SCOTUS hand on those regulatory actions of which conservatives don’t approve—all these trophy wins have been banked, with more to come. Greenhouse ends on what anyone who believes in checks and balances should find chilling: “The Supreme Court now is this country’s ultimate political prize.” Read more »

Oppenheimer VIII: The House of Science

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

This is the eighth in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here.

“Oppenheimer, Julius Robert”, by David A. Wargowski, December 7, 2018

After his shameful security hearing, many of Oppenheimer’s colleagues thought he was a broken man, “like a wounded animal” as one colleague said. But Freeman Dyson, a young physicist who was as perceptive of human nature as anyone, saw it differently: “As far as we were concerned, he was a better director after the hearing than he was before.”

Director of what? Of the “one, true, platonic heaven”, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a place where the world’s leading thinkers could think and toil in unfettered surroundings. It was here that Oppenheimer entered the fourth and final act of his life, one that was to thrust him on the national and international stages. There is no doubt that the hearing deeply affected him, but instead of dooming him to a life of obscurity and seclusion, it invested him with a new persona, a new role as a public intellectual in which he performed magnificently. Far from being the end of his life, the hearing signaled a new beginning.

It had been an unpromising start. “Princeton is a madhouse”, Oppenheimer had written to his brother Frank in a 1935 letter, “its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation.” The institute had been set up by funds from a wealthy brother and sister, Louis and Caroline Bamberger who, just before the depression hit, had fortuitously sold their department store to R. H. Macy’s for $11 million. The philanthropic Bambergers wanted to give back to the community and sought the advice of a leading educator, Abraham Flexner, as to how they should put the money to good use. Flexner dissuaded them from starting a medical school in Newark. Instead he had a novel idea. As an educator he knew the importance of pure, curiosity-driven research that may or may not yield practical dividends. Later in 1939 he wrote an influential article for Harper’s Magazine titled “The Usefulness of Useless Research” in which he laid out his vision. Read more »

How Quantum Models Work

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

A notable theorist visits a notable laboratory (Stephen Hawking at CERN, 2013)

The science lab and the theory suite

If you spend any time doing science, you might notice that some things change when you close the door to the lab and walk into the theory suite.

In the laboratory, surprising things happen, no doubt about it. Depending on the type of lab you’re working in, you might see liquid nitrogen boiling out from a container, solutions changing color only near their surfaces, or microorganisms unexpectedly mutating. But once roughly the same thing happens a few times in a row, the conventional scientific attitude is to suppose that you can make sense of these observations. Sure, you can still expect a few outliers that don’t follow the usual trends, but there’s nothing in the laboratory that forces one to take any strong metaphysical positions. The surprises, instead, are of the sort that might lead someone to ask, Can I see that again? What conditions would allow this surprise to reoccur?

Of course, the ideas discussed back in the theory suite are, in some indirect way, just codified responses to old observational surprises. But scientists—at least, young scientists—rarely think in such pragmatic terms. Most young scientists are cradle realists, and start out with the impression that there is quite a cozy relationship between the entities they invoke in the theory suite and the observations they make back in the lab. This can be quite confusing, since connecting theory to observation is rarely so straightforward as simply calculating from first principles.

The types of experiments I’ve had been able to observe most closely involve electron microscopes. For many cases where electron microscopes are involved, workers will use quantum models to describe the observations. I’ve written about quantum models a few times before, but I haven’t discussed much about how quantum physics models differ from their classical physics counterparts. Last summer, I worked out a simple, concrete example in detail, and this column will discuss the upshot of that, leaving out the details. If you’ve ever wondered, how exactly do quantum models work?—or even if you haven’t wondered, but are wondering now that I mention it—well, read on. Read more »

Wordkeys: On ‘Kindness’

Posted on by Gus Mitchell

by Gus Mitchell

‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’ Henry James apparently spoke these words to his nephew Billy James in 1902. TV personality Mr. Rogers later took it up – with an intriguing preface: ‘There are three ultimate ways to success: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’

There is something revealing about that reformulation, from the beginning, to the second half of the twentieth century, that least ‘kind’ of all centuries. It holds true today as well. Kindness has become one of the indispensable buzz-virtues (or, as I conceive them, ‘word-virtues’) of our moment – see also ‘creativity’, ‘community’, ‘care’, and so on. The ubiquity of these words often masks a troubling lack of useful definition or resonance, not to mention the kind of morality-washing used to justify a great deal of lazy thinking and acting. Words in the place of a meaning. This trend has been helped on its way by an enthusiastically hijacking and hollowing by corporate or political instigators, whose interests are opposed to any genuine realisation of these ideals.

In a (no doubt vain) attempt to not be judged by some as callous or psychotic in this essay, let me preface everything to follow: the inherent qualities, the real virtues enshrined in words such as these, are ones I cherish. I’m not attempting to persuade anyone not to ‘be kind’, as you commonly understand it. Instead, I hope that by illuminating the fuzzy blubber gathering around these word-virtues – a blubber enshrined in the mimetic mindlessness of the internet – might help one see more clearly that, by them, we are selling ourselves short. Read more »

Headline

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Why wombats poop cubes: an engineer explains the science and the applicationsThe Lede: Wombats ate five children at a drive thru restaurant in Omegosh, Texas last week.

The Body: A wisdom of wombats, on the run from massive fires in their Australian homelands, surrounded five children at a Checkers drive thru and lectured them on the disproportionate impact of the U.S. carbon footprint, before devouring them sans cutlery. Normally herbivores, the marsupials said later that they were eating young American child meat to make an ironic statement about climate change. Afterwards they were taken into custody and assigned a public defender. When reached for comment, their lawyer said the wombats were planning a hunger strike while in prison.

Ending: Does Jesus want us forgive the wombats, or blame the children? Perhaps we can do both.

*

The Lede: There’s someone in California who might like you.

The Body: California is home to nearly 40,000,000 people. One of them may like you. Like, really like you. That’s according to Cletus Nerdtoster, professor of probability statistics at California Polytechinc State University, who says chances are there’s someone in the Golden State who has the hots for you.

“Can’t rule it out.  There’s just so many goddamned people here.”

But what to do about it?  Nerdtoster has fewer insights into how to actually meet that person.

“I met my wife at the library. But if you’re not here in California, I guess that wouldn’t work.”

Nerdtoster says he is unfamiliar with how dating apps work.

Ending: Do you even want to be liked? Read more »

RF Kuang’s Novel Yellowface and Diversity in US Publishing

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

Does the title of the novel make you cringe or what?

In RF Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface, the setup is simple: within pages of the book’s opening, two frenemies –who met at an elite university–are having dinner together. Athena, who is Asian-American, has seen tremendous success in her work. The other woman June is white and has been anything but successful. Not surprisingly, June is envious of Athena’s career….Could it be because Athena is a drop-dead gorgeous person of color? Could it be because of her sexy British accent and tall ballerina-like figure?

Or maybe it’s because she is an incredible writer and knows what she’s doing?

June can only keep wondering…. Until, suddenly during Athena chokes on a pandan pancake and dies.

And yes, you guessed it: June steals Athena’s manuscript-in-progress… Read more »